This novel takes the saga of the Mageworlds back to its beginning, to the first Mage to reach across the gap between their worlds and those of the Adepts. For the first time we have the story from the Mages' side, a sympathetic look at a society very alien to our own, but with its own code of honor, its own pattern of decencies.

The protagonist is the man we knew only as the Professor in the original Mageworlds trilogy. In those books he was an old man at the end of his greatly-extended life. In this one he is a young man attaching himself to a Circle of Mages with a beautiful dream. Their First hopes to Voidwalk across the Edge (what the people on the other side call the Rift) and establish peaceful trade with the people there.

But the plan may well be doomed from the start. Their symbolic systems are so completely different that their actions are almost guaranteed to be misunderstood. Worse, dissention back in the homeworlds is rapidly developing into outright hostility.